


Soul Under Wing

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Set to the Tune of a Greek Myth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 09:11:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1893408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky's mother orders him to, for god's sake (hers, specifically), do something about all the people in love with Steve.</p><p>Did I mention Bucky's mother is Aphrodite?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soul Under Wing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [caughtinanocean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/caughtinanocean/gifts).



> Please do not ask. [caughtinanocean](http://caughtinanocean.tumblr.com/) requested a ficlet with "Steve/Bucky, Greek myth of your choice." So here it is! Greek myths, poor attempts at humor, and a happy ending. I managed everything but the "ficlet" part.
> 
> For the original tumblr post, see [here](http://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/90713247628/prompts-i-was-going-to-give-you-one-of-those)
> 
> Explanation for which Greek myth at the end.

Steven was the comeliest young man the mortal world had seen. From a frail boy, he had grown taller than the olive trees, stronger than oxen, his hair a glowing rival to Helios' fiery chariot. His mother said that he must have the favor of the gods – but the gods hadn't noticed Steve at all, until his physical beauty and his prowess with a sword drew men and women from across the land, taking up their offerings to Aphrodite and laying them at Steve's feet, instead.

Steve found this terribly embarrassing, and generally turned a delicate shade of pink under skin tanned golden by the sun across his shoulders as he tilled the family's land. No one minded overmuch when he fled back into the house, as his siblings Natasha and Sam were also stunning, if not as lovely as Steve. Aphrodite, on the other hand, walked through her empty temples and seethed.

“You must kill this boy,” she told her son without glancing back over her milk-white shoulder. He would be following her obediently, as he always was, his arrows awaiting her commands. She had trained him well.

There was a pause, and the smooth marble of the temple shook with her impatience. “Of course, Mother,” he soothed, yet hesitated, his pale eyes hidden under waves of dark hair. With his bow tucked onto his back, his wings folded away where no mortal could see, her child looked less like the god of love and more like one of Boreas' wayward, icy heirs.

“Then why do you linger?” she snapped, a flush suffusing her cheeks, sea froth and poppies, beauty that foolish mortal men could not begin to comprehend.

He set his stance wide, folded muscular arms across the fabric on his chest, suddenly very much a child of war. Fathers were such unfortunate, troublesome things. “It's just, this boy doesn't seem to have done anything wrong,” he pointed out. “He makes his sacrifices to you, and you know they are in earnest.” He did not say that the boy also sacrificed to love, carrying bushels of flowers in broad, callused hands and settling them gently below the altar. Shredding a few as he sat, and wished that he might be loved for his soul and not the width of his shoulders, or the planes of his face. Bucky did not tell his mother that he crouched in the eaves and watched, an arrow nocked and trembling between his hands.

“Fine.” Aphrodite scowled, stomped one perfectly formed foot and reduced two nearby buildings to rubble. “Don't kill him. Marry him off to a goat, or make him hideous.” She set her hands on voluptuous hips and scoured the vacant temple with azure eyes. “Just do _something_ , or that witch Hera will find out where my offerings are going and I will never hear the end of it!”

Bucky bowed, extended pale, cloud-white wings that filled half the temple, and took to the air to do his mother's bidding.

Steve was at home, hiding in the olive trees, the glow of his golden hair under Selene's reflected light. Hecate's doing, the moonlight filtered through gnarled branches to illuminate the mortal – Bucky had waited for dark to speak with her, gathered ingredients at her bidding to mix the potion that would make Steve undesirable to anyone who wished to marry such beauty.

He hesitated when he thought of lavender and rose petals torn under strong hands, the perfume of flowers and the heartfelt wish for love. But it must not matter. His mother would kill the boy – or have his father start a war, and surely Steve would be sent to fight – unless he acted, and a life without marriage was better than being a shade in the dark realms.

Bucky alighted, invisible, next to Steve's still form. The man had fallen asleep, waiting for his pursuers to finish imposing on his family's hospitality and go home. His chiton had rucked up over the muscles of his thighs, carved like the marble of Bucky's mother's temples. Steve's dark cloak was rolled into a ball and shoved under his head to pillow it, the profile of his face silhouetted by Selene's fond gaze, his parted lips the shape of Bucky's bow.

He could never stand so close, in the temple, close enough to smell the human sweat and the scent of rose water on Steve's brow. He could never show himself to a mortal – the beauty of the gods was terrible to see. Bucky had watched this mortal boy become a man, drawn in years ago by a child's pure wish that he be loved. The god of love held physical graces in low esteem (his mother and father, after all, were renowned for their graces, but he had seen their domestic squabbles, and his uncle thrown out of the bedroom window and off the mountain), but Steve's soul shone the way it had since he was young, brighter than the moonlight on his face.

Fingers shaking, he tugged Hecate's vial from his belt, dusted the potion over Steve's body and through his dreams. The man would not need to sleep in fields, any more, for all his suitors would see him tomorrow and turn away, repulsed without knowing why. Then Steve shifted, and Bucky jumped backward, surprised, overbalanced into his wings and toppled forward again, the arrow that he kept ever-ready in his right hand sinking into the unmarred skin of Steve's thigh.

“Argus' tail feathers!” he cursed. Now Steve would fall in love, and the potion ensured that no one would want him in return. It was a wretched way to treat a true supplicant, no matter what Aphrodite said. Furious, grieving for Steve's gentle soul, Bucky ripped the arrow free and squeezed it tight in his hands.

He did not, apparently, extract the arrow with sufficient care, since Steve winced and rubbed his thigh, then yawned and blinked eyes the color of the sky at mid-summer up into the night. “Mmm,” the mortal hummed, reaching out his callused fingers to brush against Bucky's cheek. “My favorite dream.” Bucky – who was clearly not as invisible as he'd thought – tried to scuttle backwards and only succeeded in leaning his cheek into Steve's sleepy touch. This seemed to please the man, since he smiled, rubbed a thumb over Bucky's cheekbone, and drifted back off into Morpheus' embrace.

Bucky stayed until Eos shooed him over the horizon, crouched on his heels and watching the starlight on Steve's skin. He never noticed that his left hand had gripped the arrow at its tip, blood from his palm welling over the mortal blood and settling into the flint.

  
  


Steve waited a year, went diligently to Aphrodite's temple every day that he could spare, brought her flowers in the spring and grapes hanging heavy on the vine in the autumn. Brought her son gifts, too, because somehow Eros, eternally young, caught between love and war, had always seemed less distant than the other gods. More human, perhaps.

But neither mother nor son appeared to hear him, and Steve regretted the sacrifices he had made a twelve-month before, begging that all his lecherous suitors would be gone. Now they all were gone, and Steve's mother feared that he had angered the gods and would never marry. Which was why, like any well-meaning, overbearing mother, she had dragged him to the oracle. Steve hoped this meant she would stop inviting the wandering old woman to read his fortune, because the toothless, one-eyed crone was starting to make him twitch. He wondered if the god of love had as difficult a mother as he did.

The oracle – another creepy old woman, sitting on an uncomfortable stool deep in a cave saturated with noxious fumes – declared that no man would ever marry Steve. (Then his mother fainted, and held the whole prediction up while he had to revive her.) However, the oracle finally rasped, there was a monster at the top of the mountain that _would_ marry him.

Steve decided that being an unmarried virgin really wasn't so bad after all. Natasha and Sam could just tell him about their spouses, and he could work in the vineyards and around the olive trees and stay well away from any mountains.

He decided that for another year, and then told his mother that he loved her, and shook hands with his brother and sister, because they were not the sort of siblings one hugged without serious, life-threatening repercussions. “What made you change your mind?” Sam asked, and he shrugged.

Dreams, he couldn't say. Dreams of wings that filled a room, silver like the edge of a storm before the rain, of eyes the color of sea mist and skin like a temple's altar stone. Dreams that someone terrible and fearsome hovered over him, curled wings around him and pressed cool lips to his forehead as he slept. “Who can foil the fates?” he replied, packing away a loaf of bread and a jug of his family's wine for the journey. And what if, he wondered, the monster was as lonely as Steve, as lonely as the otherworldly creature that haunted his dreams.

So he climbed to the top of the mountain, still feeling small and inconsequential on his tiny peak, dwarfed by the towering majesty of Olympus and the wreath of clouds through which no mortal passed. And sat down. And waited. And finished the loaf of bread. And waited. And finished the wine.

Wherever this monster was, it certainly didn't seem all that eager to meet its promised husband.

Eventually, Steve gave up and went to sleep, because he certainly wasn't going back home to face his mother. He couldn't tell if she'd wail and rend her clothes at marrying him to a monster – or if she'd do it when he came back unwed.

When he woke up, he was laying naked on the softest bed he'd ever felt, the wind blowing a warm night breeze over the sweat cooling on his skin. The room was steeped in the night, not even the light from stars to see by. Cool fingers trailed down his cheek, over the pulse thudding through his throat, down the sensitive planes of his chest.

Steve gasped, arched up into the gentle touch. “You don't feel much like a monster,” he whispered, reaching his own hands blindly out, dragging them up defined muscles to a square jaw, into waves of silken hair that felt like the year's first harvest, the velvet petals on the first blossoms of spring.

The monster – his husband – smiled against Steve's palm, laid open-mouthed kisses down his wrist, following the veins in his arm up to his shoulder, lingering over his collarbone until Steve rolled them over, crashing their mouths together and draping his over-heated limbs across a body that felt like it had been carved from the mountain itself, perfect and cold to the touch.

“Love is a monstrous thing, Steven,” his husband murmured, biting down on Steve's lip. Then he rose to meet Steve with the passion of a warrior on the battlefield, a lover under Aphrodite's spell, and there was no more talking at all.

  
  


“This house is yours,” Steve's husband said, kissing the words into his hair, voice hoarse from shouting Steve's name. Steve grumbled, trying to pull the other man back into bed and sleep until dawn crept over the sills. “Shh, I must go. I have – duties to perform. Whatever you wish is yours, but you must remain here, and you must not light any lamps after dark.” Whatever noise Steve made was not enough to satisfy his husband. “Steve, can you hear me?” his husband asked, sharp like the sudden cold wind into their room, the crackle of thunder on the hills.

“No lamps,” Steve repeated obligingly, and snuggled deeper into the blankets that must have been woven by Hestia herself, they were so soft.

When he woke up that morning, light streaming peacefully through the window and carding through his hair, Steve was alone.

  
  


This continued into the autumn, Steve whiling away his days with scrolls or cooking food that appeared in the kitchen every morning, sparkling with dew or burnished like wheat under Demeter's feet. He woke before the dawn, now, begged his husband – Bucky – to stay with him in bed, to stay draped in velveteen sheets and let Steve sketch his form so that he wouldn't forget.

Bucky always shook his head, dropped his lips to Steve's in a regretful kiss, and vanished with what felt like the sweep of feathers across his skin.

Finally, in autumn, Steve sat in the orchard behind the house and watched Helios sink into the sea, greeting Hera's parents as his friends and kin. Normally he raced inside as soon as the night came, eager for Bucky's touch and his quiet words and the peace that settled in Steve's soul knowing he was loved.

Or hoping he was loved. Bucky brought Steve whatever he asked for, charcoal and parchment and figs so ripe they had split down one side, rich juice spilling through. But he never stayed until morning, and Steve spent every day as alone as he had been the year before, sitting in Aphrodite's temple and hoping that Eros would pity the foolish, mortal boy. Lonelier, because he had his family then, and now he had no one at all.

“Steve?” Bucky called, clarion over the fields, voice rolling over the vineyard and through the trees like a bell, sounding a pure note that could carry forever through the dark. If the oracle had spoken truly, then monsters must be as lovely as gods. “Steve, what's wrong? Why are you crying?”

“I'm not crying,” Steve disagreed, sniffling as he leaned back into Bucky's embrace, settling his aching head onto his husband's shoulder and burying his reddened eyes against the strong lines of his neck. “I just miss you,” he admitted, words muffled against cool skin.

“I miss you, too,” Bucky told him, tightened his grip on Steve's chest. “But you know I can't be here during the day.”

 _I don't know_ why _,_ Steve wanted to shout, but Bucky sounded near tears as it was, and Steve had never been cruel. “I know,” he said, instead. “But it's awful, with no one else here. Could we go visit my family, maybe? Just for a few days?”

Bucky's fingers toyed with his hair, and Steve brought his own hands up to caress his husband's back, the bones of his spine and the muscles under his shoulders familiar and loved. “I can't do that,” he finally said, sounding dismayed to tell Steve no twice in one evening. “But perhaps they could come here, to keep you company? Would you like your whole family?”

“My family isn't a bunch of figs, Buck,” Steve laughed. “You can't just scoop them up and bring them here, wherever here is.” Bucky didn't reply, though he stilled – shifty, Steve would have said, if he could see Bucky's face. “My mother shouldn't make such a long journey,” he declared. “But perhaps my brother and sister could come? I would like to see them. To show them where we live.” _To show them my husband, the one I've never seen_. Cheered by the thought of having visitors, Steve wound his fingers through Bucky's long hair and kissed him the way he'd wished to do all day.

“Brother, sister, yes, I can do that,” Bucky mumbled into his mouth, pulling them both down into the grass that never seemed to brown or die. “Is that all? Are we done talking, now?”

“Well. . .” Steve pushed Bucky's chiton over his head, dropped his chin to the top of one perfect, marble thigh and pretended to ponder. “I have wanted another vase to keep oil in, perhaps one that -”

“I will bring you every vase in Olympus if you _move your mouth_ , Steve,” Bucky snapped, and all the branches in the orchard shook their leaves free, coating them with the first tears of Demeter's grief.

Steve moved his mouth, and the next morning the house was filled with vases, small pots stacked into large, craftsmanship so fine that none of them fell when Natasha stormed into his room and shouted, “Steve, what in Hades' name is going on?”

  
  


“Monster,” Sam said again, though he was hard to understand with his mouth full of eggplant. He swallowed a glass of unwatered wine, blinked at it, said, “Man, that stuff is amazing,” and poured some more.

“ _Monster_ ,” Natasha interrupted, rolling her eyes at Sam and glowering at Steve. “What _else_ could all this -” and she gestured at the fine tapestries on the walls, the low sofas with silk pillows, the braziers shining like new copper plates “- be for?”

“You think he bought me vases because he wants to eat me?” Steve replied, incredulous. “How does that even make sense?”

“He'th fattening you upth,” Sam retorted, mouth full of the sticky rolls Bucky had left in a basket by the bed. “It'th what monthterth do.”

“Well, then, at least he'll eat you first,” Steve growled, and stole back the last roll. He could feel the ache building in his temples, kept glancing at the horizon and willing the sun's chariot to go a little faster, to bring the night and Bucky so that he could feel safe and loved in his husband's arms. His husband the monster.

“We're just worried about you,” Natasha said, curling her small hand over his. “You disappear to this monster's lair the oracle warned about, and we don't see you for months and he won't let you come visit us, and now you tell us that you've never even seen him. He's tricking you somehow, Steve, and you're just too nice to see it.”

“He loves me,” Steve argued, but the words felt weak and insubstantial in the light of day, a promise Bucky made in the night that evaporated with the dawn. Gone like his husband every morning, with no explanation or assurance of his return.

Sam and Natasha both gave him pitying looks, the kind they always had when Steve's heart got the better of his head. The looks they gave him when he sat and spoke to Eros for hours, with nothing given in recompense.

“All right, so let's say he does love you, and he's not a monster, oracle of truth thing aside.” Sam was more soothing than Natasha, kinder even when he was holding out a lantern and a long knife. “Then he'll forgive you for wanting to see his face.” He handed Steve the lantern, and Steve felt like he'd already betrayed Bucky when he took it, ran his thumb over the wick. Sam held up the knife. “And if he isn't who he says he is, you end this whole charade before it sucks the marrow from your bones.”

 _Too late_ , Steve thought, but he tucked the blade into his belt.

  
  


Steve waited until Bucky had fallen asleep, their legs intertwined and his heart hammering with guilt at what he was about to do. Guilt, and anticipation that he would finally see Bucky's face, have it to carry with him through the long hours of the day.

He lit the lamp in another room, cupped its flame with the hand carrying the knife. Held it over their bed, and then froze.

Bucky's skin was the same pale marble as the altar where Steve had laid his gifts. His form was perfect, the blend of his mother's beauty and his father's battle-hardened physique, stretched languid over their sheets and grasping at the warmth that Steve had taken with him when he stood. His wings splayed over the entirety of their bed, silver like moonlight and lovers dreams, the sky between the storm and Iris' arch that came behind. Translucent one moment, thick and tempered steel like Bucky's corded arms the next.

Eros. Bucky was Eros, and all the monsters must be gods.

Unable to help himself, Steve bent closer to Bucky's face, desperate to catalogue every line, every beautiful light and shade so that he could draw it over and over and never hope to do it justice. Man could never capture the gods, after all.

But his elbow knocked the edge of the bed and the lamp tilted, hot oil dripping over the wick and onto the pale feathers of Bucky's wing. Startled Steve's husband awake, and he opened eyes the color of the first wash of dawn. Eyes that had watched and waited through Steve's dreams since he was a boy.

“Persephone's pomegranate, Steve,” Bucky croaked, voice thick with sleep, “I told you not to -” Then he blinked, and saw the knife. Steve flung it away, heard it ricochet off the mosaic tiles on the floor, but his heart had already shattered as Bucky's face fell. Knives for monsters, to cut off their heads.

“Now I know how it feels,” Bucky said softly, twisting to his feet and out of Steve's clutching hands. “To be pierced with heartbreak.”

“Bucky!” Steve cried, tripping behind him to the window, catching a handful of feathers where he'd hoped to wrap his arms around cool flesh and make Bucky stay.

Crouching on the windowsill, his wings impossibly huge and yet diminished to fit through the frame, Bucky turned and gave Steve a rueful smile, lit by the lamp still in Steve's hand.

“Love is a monstrous thing,” he said, and leaped.

And what was there for Steve to do, then, besides follow?

  
  


Steve awoke in the olive grove he had played in as a boy and worked as a man. For a moment, he wondered if he had dreamed it, months of Bucky's touch and his love, tapestries and parchment and midnight forays into the kitchen for dates soaked in honey. Bucky's wings, strong and ethereal as he'd flown into the night.

It might have been a dream, but for the few silvery feathers still clenched in his hand, damp with dew cold enough to make Steve shiver.

When he walked naked into the house, his mother screamed. And, as expected, rent her gown and began wailing in dramatic fashion. Sam and Natasha were both more understated in their bemusement – and surprised to find themselves awake in their family home and not the palace they had occupied the day before – but they had planted the doubt in Steve's mind and given him the knife and he couldn't face them without thinking of his betrayal.

He spent the morning filling a cart with grapes, and wine, sweetmeats and whatever else their larder had that was fit for a goddess.

“Please,” he begged, arms filled with wine jugs. The temple shook, and the marble seams in the pillars scraped an ominous tune. He ignored it – he was used to mothers, and it seemed the gods were not so different as he'd thought – and set his offerings carefully on the altar. Laid them out so that even the proffered display paid homage to Aphrodite's beauty, and her grace.

Aphrodite. His _mother-in-law_.

“ _Please_ , Aphrodite,” he said again, going to his knees. “I love him. He's my husband.”

“You love him?” It was a nasty tone for such a lovely voice, the woman sensuous even under the draping of her gown, vibrating with power though she tried to hide it in curved, sun-kissed flesh and red lips. “Do you kill all your lovers, then, or do you reserve that for your husbands?”

“I would never hurt Bucky,” he insisted, because it had been true even when he had held the knife, knowing that if it were a monster under his lantern, Steve would turn the blade to his own chest. He had never understood how to love with only part of his soul.

“Not true!” she shrieked, and her rage tore the roofs from nearby barns, drew icy wind off the mountains and curdled milk still in the pail. “You hurt him now, foolish boy stabbed with his own arrows! He should have killed you.”

Already on his knees, Steve bent forward until his forehead pressed to the floor stones, the marble cool like Bucky's skin under his hands. “I need your help, goddess,” he pleaded. “I will do anything you ask, to prove that I truly love him, if you will only give me the chance to speak with him again.” Aphrodite was not the one he needed to convince of his love, but she was currently Steve's only way to reach her son.

All the wine jugs cracked, ground down to the dust they came from by Aphrodite's anger. Wine dripped off the dais, pooled around Steve's sandals and his knees.

“Anything?” she repeated, low and dangerous. The beauty of the gods was terrible to mortal man.

“Anything,” he answered, steady and true.

“Fine.” She crossed her arms, kicked at him with one delicate foot until he rose. “I have a few things in mind.”

  
  


Bucky had known Steve was foolishly brave – that much had been clear even before the man _leaped out of a window_ to chase his husband down – but approaching his mother for help took a whole different level of bravery. Or stupidity. Really, more stupidity, Bucky decided, staring at the gargantuan pile of grains dwarfing Steve and Aphrodite, in her mortal form. His mother wanted men to love her, and looking upon a goddess inspired nothing but fear.

“You want me to. . .separate the wheat from the rye?” Steve repeated, anxious, wringing his hands. Bucky had felt those hands cup his face, run down his chest, felt calluses coated with oil as they slid inside him, radiating a mortal's heat.

“And the barley,” Aphrodite specified, a harridan when she chose to be. All the time, if you asked his father, but Bucky's father was overfond of war. “By tomorrow morning.” Her smirk bordered on unpleasant, the grin of sea monster who had scented blood. “You're good at working through the night, I've heard.” With a cackle and a dip of her head, she vanished and left Steve with the impossible pile of grains.

Steve sighed, and knelt down to start sorting the handful closest to him, like a little boy attempting to bail out the seas. Bucky felt his heart lift, at the stubborn set of Steve's jaw, the determination in the face of ludicrous odds.

Grain. As though his mother aspired to be the next Demeter, casting Bucky in Persephone's tired role. How tacky.

Bucky spoke to the ants climbing through the sap of the nearest tree, squatted next to the anthill to ask a boon of their queen. He gathered the diminutive army, and sent them marching to Steve's aid.

Steve, nowhere near as idiotic as his bravery made him out to be, saw the ants rushing toward their stations and smiled.

“The knife wasn't for you, you know,” he said aloud, though his eyes never strayed from the pile of grains in his hand. “I could never have hurt you.”

“You dumped hot oil on me,” Bucky riposted, acerbic, and Steve's laugh blew the wheat husks off his palm.

“I tripped over your massive wings. Which I could have avoided, _if you'd told me they were there_.”

Bucky knelt behind Steve, rested his head on the strong, capable shoulder, muscles working as Steve and the ants sorted the grains. Steve, raised on tales of the gods, raised with faith that had carried him to Aphrodite's temple and won him Eros' hand, knew better than to try to catch a glimpse of his husband's face. Too late, but he had not known then that in the sight that goes on forever, sometimes one cannot tell a monster from a god.

“I love you,” Steve whispered, closing his eyes and tilting his head back for a kiss.

“Sleep,” Bucky told him, and folded them both in his wings.

  
  


Aphrodite took great pleasure in describing the next task. As soon as she'd left, Steve groaned. “Did your mother secretly want to be a farmer?” he queried, gazing across the gaily splashing stream to the golden sheep in the pasture below.

Golden sheep, with pointy horns and hooves probably specially sharpened by the gods. First grains – and Aphrodite had not been pleased to find the work done when she arrived at dawn, Steve used to waking in the night to bid his husband farewell, leaving him plenty of time to thank all of the ants for their kindness and run his fingers over the feathers tucked away in his belt – and now sheep. His next task was probably going to be stamping the grapes in Demeter's personal vineyard. Or shoveling manure. He hoped Heracles had accomplished that one to everyone's satisfaction, because he loved Bucky, but the Augean stables might be too much to ask.

“I cannot say if the goddess would like to farm,” came a bright, burbling response by Steve's feet. “But you will find this task quite simple if you wait until Helios reaches his apogee. That is when the sheep rest, and none will attack you if you mean them no harm.”

“Thanks,” Steve told the river, grateful, and slipped off his sandals to wait.

  
  


“Someone is helping you!” Aphrodite screeched, but not even a goddess could scream louder than Steve's mother, and he didn't flinch. She flung the gold wool on the ground and stomped on it, which seemed a bit ungracious considering she had requested it in the first place, but Steve wasn't in a position to argue.

He wanted his husband back. He wanted to watch Bucky wake up long after Eos had trailed the morning dew, push dark hair off his beautiful, terrifying face and kiss him through the day. If that meant fetching and carrying for his mother-in-law until she interceded for him with Zeus, then he would shear a thousand sheep.

“Here.” She thrust a chalice at him, molded from metal dark as bronze but heavier, like a soldier's armor in a war. Aphrodite's lover had left some of his handicrafts behind, when they'd thrown him out. “Fill this.”

“Uh.” Fetching and carrying it was, then. “With water?” he inquired, confused, and then found himself standing at the base of a surging, roiling waterfall that spilled from some height too far up too see, pounding down onto craggy rocks and foaming into the dark, hissing and spitting as it sailed downstream from the furious thunder of the falls.

“Ares' iron balls!” Steve gasped, and jumped backward onto the shore. Then he blushed. Bucky's cursing had clearly worn off. He glanced around, but no one living haunted these shores, only the angry river and the barren coast, sharp, black stones rough and abrasive on his skin.

As far as Steve could tell, there was no way to fill the cup without toppling off the cliff into the frothing river, or creeping close to the waterfall and slipping on the wet rocks to meet his death on the boulders and raging water below.

“I wouldn't go in there, if I were you,” a familiar voice warned, and Steve sighed in relief as he felt wings wrap him in a gentle embrace.

“You're enjoying this, aren't you?” he sniped, eyes closed. “Watching your mother order me around. Next she'll want slippers woven from spider silk, or a necklace made of sea monsters' teeth.” Bucky tensed at the last words, and Steve shook his head, turned so that he could wrap his husband in his arms. “Don't be stupid, Buck. You're far too pretty to be a monster. But if your mother asks me to pull out all your teeth, I might have to agree. She's kind of scary.”

“All the gods are,” Bucky warned, nosing into the warm skin at Steve's neck. “That's the river Styx,” he added, once they'd wound into one being, four arms and legs, two heads and two wings. “The river of hatred. Drink from it and you'll end up a shade, I think. Even the gods who drink it lose their voice for years.”

Steve's head shot up, and he grinned, eyes still clamped shut. “Excellent! Forget the danger – I will bring your mother a whole _jug_ of this for a little peace.”

Bucky snorted, and plucked the chalice from Steve's hands, taking advantage of Steve's blindness to kiss the smirk off his lips. “You'll stay right here, is what you'll do,” he countered, then flew into the seething spray. Steve felt the wings brush past his face, leaned toward the solidity that Bucky always offered even as it flew away.

A moment later and Bucky returned, chalice weighted with boiling hatred in his hands.

“You're beautiful,” he said, taking the cup with one hand and running his fingers over Bucky's nose with other, the calluses catching on the flawless skin.

“You've only seen me once, and it was enough to make you jump out a window,” Bucky retorted, defensive but smiling under Steve's hand.

Steve laughed. “That's not true,” he disagreed. “You watched me grow up. I saw you all the time, in the temple. In the olive grove, once. You were always in my dreams.”

“My mother's coming.” Bucky's words were curt, but his voice caught when Steve spoke, and the kiss he pressed to Steve's mouth before leaving brimmed with promises only Eros could make.

  
  


This, Steve decided, was beyond ridiculous. This was why all the myths warned mortals that the gods were _crazy_.

“Make up?” he said for the fifth time, dubious. “You want me to go to _hell_ to ask the queen of the underworld to help _you_ powder your nose?”

Aphrodite patted her nose with one porcelain hand, smirking nastily at him. “It's getting a bit of a shine, don't you think? I can feel winter chafing at my skin already.”

 _You are filled with more shit than the Augean stables_ , Steve didn't say, because he had been raised to be polite. Even to his in-laws. Even to a goddess who sent him on errands to the underworld, from which no mortal returned alive.

“I don't know why you bother,” he announced, instead, and she momentarily softened as she waited for the end of the compliment, expecting to be informed that she was as lovely and fresh as a summer breeze. “I know that's not your true form.”

In a heartbeat, Aphrodite stood twice as tall, gold magma-hot and threading through her veins. “Foolish boy,” she warned, her voice sharp as the crack of a branch in a sea-driven storm. “You know what happens to mortals who gaze upon the gods.” Immolation. Death. The true power of the gods was a naked blade no mortal was meant to see.

“Well,” Steve said mildly, nearly inaudible through the wind whipping at his chiton, tearing at his hair. “You _are_ trying to send me to hell.”

Since Aphrodite refused to be helpful in any manner whatsoever, Steve found himself teetering at the edge of a cliff. The fastest way to the underworld was down, straight off the ledge. It wouldn't be ideal, loving Bucky as a shade, but any world where he could see Bucky was better than one where the gods declared him inadequate and sent him away forever. If proving his worth entailed a coin in his mouth for the ferryman, then Steve would pay it gladly.

“Hestia's hearth, you're a fool.” Wings, feathers abrasive in their anger, curved around Steve's torso and tugged him away from the cliff. “Were you actually planning on plummeting straight into hell?”

“Um.” Steve blushed, a little grateful that he couldn't see the expression on Bucky's face.

“You _idiot_.” The air crystallized around them, ice coating Steve's skin, an avalanche launched in the crevasse by the reverberations of Bucky's voice. The gods were passionate creatures, and none more so than the union of love and war. Eros loved without reserve, and battled to keep it.

Eros. Steve's _husband_.

“I love you?” he tried, and Bucky growled. Steve bit down a laugh, afraid that if he made Bucky angrier they'd open a chasm and _all_ collapse into hell. “Fine, oh mighty scion in the line of Zeus, you want to draw me a map to the underworld?”

“I want to lock you in our house until you stop doing stupid things!” Bucky roared, but quieted as soon as he caught sight of Steve's smile.

“Our house,” Steve echoed, and felt Bucky's unwilling smile against his lips. “That sounds good to me.”

  
  


“I ask a boon,” Bucky importuned the high table. If he had been mortal, no one would have heard him, since his face was pressed into the floor. Prostrating oneself in the hall of the gods wasn't strictly necessary – especially for someone with the power that he had, the child of beauty and terror, love wild enough to move mountains and hate that fueled centuries of war – but his grandparents were fond of pomp and ceremony.

“Is that Eros?” Zeus slurred at his wife, who wasn't speaking to him again. It served his grandfather right, for sleeping with a cow when he'd married his witch of a sister millennia before. “He's impossible to see, under all those feathers. Looks like a damned hen house.”

“As the fox,” Athena riposted, “I'm sure you would know.” A pause. “Father. Tell him to rise.” Athena's wisdom tended more to the side of practicality, once Zeus got into the mead. “And put that cup down, Aphrodite diluted it with Styx water. Do you want a sore throat as well as an angry wife?”

Zeus cleared his throat, and Bucky debated simply taking a nap and waiting for someone to step on him and remember he was there. This is why he preferred to spend his time _away_ from Mt. Olympus. “Rise, son of Aphrodite, and we will hear your plea.”

“Eros is in lo-ove,” Artemis crooned, leering at him, eyes full of the hunt.

Apollo, always only seconds behind his sister, wiggled his golden eyebrows with a lascivious grin. “ _Pricked_ with his own arrow, hmm?” he jeered, and the twins burst into irritating laughter.

Bucky was doing this for Steve. If his mortal husband could walk into hell for him, he could stand one ill-begotten party on Olympus.

“I am in love,” he admitted, because there was no point in pleading for anything if he didn't. “But my husband is mortal.” A collective gasp went up from the table – some, like Hestia, at the word mortal, _most_ of them more appalled by the word husband. The gods did not much care for vows, among their own. “And my mother is . . .”

“Acting like a bitch?” Hera supplied, helpful.

Zeus beamed at his sneering wife. “Hera, my dear! So lovely to hear from you again.” She splashed her unfinished wine into his face. The leader of the gods, ever pragmatic, licked the drips from his mustache.

“Attempting to ensure that he truly loves me,” Bucky corrected, certain that his mother could hear them. Love and war, after all, dealt in secrets whispered through walls, miscommunications slanted through hostile eyes.

“He does, though.” Bucky stared at his hands, unused to speaking of an emotion that he saw only from the end of his bow, the point of his arrow. That he saw on Steve's face, whenever he heard Bucky's terrible, inhuman voice. “He loves me enough to leap from windows and cliffs, to brave the river Styx and venture into hell. To look on me without fear. He loves me,” he said again, lifting his gaze to Zeus, who had curled his thick fingers over Hera's delicate hand. They had overturned the old order, once, with their love, burned bright with hope and banished the Titans from their world.

“And do you love him, child?” Hera asked, less shrill than she usually was at Zeus' side.

“More than I thought possible,” Bucky confessed, despite the knowledge his birth had inscribed, despite centuries of watching mortals sail through oceans and wars and terrors to keep love that could only be a fragment of the blaze in Bucky's chest. “I would give him my immortality. I would grow old and weak with him, and be happy even in pathetic mortal bones. If you made me a stone in his pocket, held close in his palm, I would be content.

“He is.” He stopped, took a breath, and painted Steve's colors in the hall of the gods. “He is the soul of it all. He is faith: faith in love, in the temples and in us, in his fellow mortals. He is hope for the future we do not always care to see, and love that will make it a better world. He is everything to me.”

“We got that,” Apollo interjected, and Zeus knocked him out of the chair with a bolt of lightning.

“I can see that this is love,” Zeus affirmed, teary-eyed. Bucky would have been flattered, but his grandfather tended to cry about anything after several cups of mead. He exchanged a look with his wife, and nodded. “You will bring us your husband, Eros, and you will be wed in these halls, with the blessing of the gods.”

Bucky bowed low – refused to prostrate himself again, in case Zeus forgot to let him up – and backed away. “Thank you, my liege,” he uttered, his throat tight with gratitude he could not convey. Rubbing his face before the twins could see and mock him, Bucky took wing into the dawn.

  
  


Persephone was really rather nice, for the queen of the damned. Hades, on the other hand, had groped Steve when offering him a “familial welcome,” then attempted to feed him a selection of sugared fruit. A selection of sugared fruit scattered over Hades' bare chest.

Steve had taken the box of Persephone's make up, kissed her hand to convey his appreciation, and run for his life, Hades' sulfuric laughter nipping at his heels all the way.

But as he set out across the plains to the fog-shrouded mountain where Aphrodite waited, Steve began to wonder. She didn't need make up. None of the gods wore make up, the whole idea farcical to any mortal who had heard their tales. And the last task had given her a cup filled with anger, roiling with deadly hate. What could Aphrodite want from Hades' realm? What if she wanted to harm someone? Steve loved Bucky, but he couldn't let Aphrodite hurt someone because of that.

All right, he conceded. Neither of his in-laws were famed for their kindness and charity, and Steve – a mortal – was hardly in a position to stop the hand of the gods. But it didn't mean that he would allow Aphrodite to use his love for Bucky to do her dirty work.

He stopped, glowered at the box. Bucky had told him not to open it, but Bucky wanted to keep him safe, would value Steve's life over anyone his mother might want to kill. Artemis' stag, what if she wanted to hurt Bucky, for marrying Steve?

That decided it. Steve slammed open the lid, determined to save his husband, and saw – he tumbled headlong into the darkness, and a dreamless sleep.

  
  


“Apollo's acne, I can't leave you anywhere!” Someone slapped Steve across the face, then shook him hard. “Steve, come on, wake up. You're going to miss our wedding!”

“I'm going to miss it on purpose if you don't _stop hitting me_!” Steve barked, then regained enough presence of mind to keep his eyes closed when he said, “Wait, _wedding_?”

Bucky kissed him, long and slow, nibbling at his lips and licking into his mouth. Steve forgot everything but the taste of his husband, better than any ambrosia could possibly be, the marble musculature under his rough hands.

“I love you,” he promised, and Bucky laughed, the peals of it bringing flowers out of their winter hibernation, sending the perfume of roses and honeysuckle through the air.

“Save it for the ceremony,” he replied, and gathered Steve in his arms to lift them both into the air.

  
  


The ceremony was blessedly short, since Steve's eyes were closed and it sounded like someone was humming drunken love poetry instead of asking for his vows.

“Ignore all my cousins,” Bucky demanded, when someone jabbed a wet finger in Steve's ear, and promptly proved that the god of love had gained half his inheritance through war. Apollo moaned in pain, and slunk back to his chair.

Then someone was holding a chalice to Steve's lips – one he seriously hoped was not the same chalice he'd given Aphrodite, because not only did he not want to die but the Styx reeked of putrid and dying things, and he did not want that in his mouth – and it smelled delicious, like honeyed dates at midnight and the first grapes of the harvest, but he wouldn't open his mouth until Bucky kissed his temple and whispered, “It's ambrosia, you fool. It's to make you immortal.”

“You want that?” he asked, shocked, nearly choking on the sip halfway to his mouth. “You'll be stuck with me forever.”

“Steve,” Bucky answered, lips still pressed to his temple, mouth carved into a smile that would fell mortal men. “Husband. That's kind of the whole point.”

Steve drank the whole cup, which might have been poor manners, but he thought it would be best to make sure no one – namely him – would be immolated when he opened his eyes.

He was right, Bucky _did_ taste better than ambrosia. But seeing his husband's pale, inhuman eyes flutter shut when Steve kissed him, tracing the pinions of his silvery wings and the pink curve of his lips when he gasped Steve's name – that was the best part of all.

**Author's Note:**

> Bucky is Eros, and Steve is Psyche. For the summary of the story that I used, see [here](http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/psyche.html)
> 
> Because how can you resist a story where Eros is afraid to let Psyche see his true self (Winter Soldier trauma?), Psyche loses Eros out a window (off a train?) and so leaps after him (crashes a plane into the ocean?), then when she thinks she may never get him back, contemplates jumping off a cliff (out of a helicarrier?).


End file.
